The local Honeycomb tablet wars has begun with Taiwanese giant Acer firing the first shot with the release of the Iconia Tab A500 in an event held at the Crowne Plaza Galleria. This 10.1-inch tablet sports some pretty nice hardware, with the A500 sporting an NVIDIA Tegra 250 dual core processor running @ 1GHz. The Iconia Smart S300 meanwhile sports a 4.8-inch display, which is currently one of the biggest displays in a smartphone so far which is complimented by a Qualcomm 8255 processor delivering 1GHz of power. I managed to get some hands on time with both – you can go here for my hands on of the Iconia Smart S300.
Unlike the Motorola XOOM, the Iconia Tab A500 has plenty of hard buttons, with the power and volume controls located on top and on the right side of the Tab. The overall build quality is pretty solid, with the unit sporting a nice metallic finish.
The different sides of the A500.
The Iconia Tab A500 has two cameras, a main 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and a secondary front facing 2 megapixel one.
This particular iteration of Honeycomb is pretty fast, and the on the whole the device is very responsive.
The Iconia Tab A500 is capable of some heavy multitasking. I opened up a couple of tabs before I ran the Android game Need for Speed Shift. Speaking of Shift, we’ll be uploading a video of the Iconia Tab A500 once our internet gets better.
Overall my short time with the Iconia Tab A500 was pretty positive. There’s still a lot of ground to cover though, as the hotel’s WiFi was pretty useless. There’s no official word on the price yet, but Acer execs say that the WiFi version of the Iconia Tab A500 will retail below Php 25,000, while the 3G equipped version will sell for less than Php 30,000. Both will become available in Q2 (May to June). We’ll get to an in-depth review as soon as we get a review unit.